


everybody's elsewhere except me

by ironoxide



Category: True Detective
Genre: Drabble Sequence, Gen, Post-Finale, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-25
Updated: 2014-05-25
Packaged: 2018-01-26 09:58:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1684247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ironoxide/pseuds/ironoxide
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She draws him, sometimes. Calls it portrait practice, because she’s never been good at faces.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>2012. Audrey and Rust spend some time together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	everybody's elsewhere except me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [badwips](https://archiveofourown.org/users/badwips/gifts).



Now the stark elders have an anorexic look;  
there is not much in the autumn wood to make  
you smile but it is not yet, not quite yet, the  
saddest time of the year. Only, there is a haunting  
sense of the imminent cessation of being; the  
year, in turning, turns in on itself.

_the erl-king_ , angela carter

* * *

**I**

“If you keep moving your head, your face’ll be all messed up.”

Cold, clean, white; antiseptic, like the sting of a sterilised blade, salt in the wound. He watches the world turn and waits for the sound of her pencil scratching against paper. She draws things nobody else seems to see. A half-eaten plate of food; a screwed-up candy wrapper that just missed the trash can; an abandoned spider web still holding fast despite the blow of artificial wind from the air con unit right by it. She draws him, sometimes. Calls it portrait practice, because she’s never been good at faces.

She is a shade: cool blue, menthol, a breeze through an open window. Hair falling like loose threads from her ponytail, lips tilted down at the corners, twisting into the same face Marty makes when shit doesn’t go his way. They’re similar like that; their faces betray things. She’s drawn a line she doesn’t like: the sound of her eraser scraping away wisps of graphite is like the whisper of a secret between them. He says, “My face is messed up already.”

“Don’t complain. At least you still got all your limbs.”

She draws faces upside down. Helps her put things in perspective.

 

 

**II**

He sees her popping pills sometimes.

She doesn’t talk as much as Marty does. Marty has this habit of filling silences, and Rust gets that. It’s the lingering thought that if he spends too much time with his mouth shut, something will come back to haunt him. But she likes the silence; and she’s good at saying things with her eyes. She’s good at holding things in front of his face, with enough behind her gaze to imply. He takes from that what he wants to, and she knows.

Red pills at twelve thirty; white pills at four; hard-shelled blues, pale pinks, little orange football-shaped capsules that she chews with her molars. And nicotine gum, peppery while she holds it between her teeth and gums. Her fingertips slate grey with charcoal, skin shining with spots of ink like freckles, like stars.

She says, “I had a nightmare about you, once.” And: “We were reading this book in lit class. Fairytales. _Erl-King will do you grievous harm_. And I used to think about you coming to the house that night, with the flowers. Erl-King.”

He says, “Erl-King will do you grievous harm.” And he watches her for a moment, the way her hands clench and unclench like they’re trying to hold onto something. “Sounds fucked up.”

She swallows a pill the colour of a burst capillary with a glass of water. “It was.”

 

 

**III**

Lights, far in the distance. She’s picking at a sandwich, and she says, “I hate mayo. I keep forgetting I hate mayo.”

Rust looks at her sidelong. One hand holding a pencil, the other twisting a curl of hair between finger and thumb. “You ever gonna show me one of those pictures?”

She taps her pencil on her lower lip. “You’re too critical.” And, pre-emptively: “Not of me. Of yourself.”

 

 

**IV**

She says, “I went to church once. Thought it would fix things.”

Rust passes her his cigarette; she takes a drag, passes it back. “Did it?”

“No.”

In her sketchbook, she shows him a room of high ceilings and stained glass, and the Virgin Mary with her hands out, looking down at her feet. Rendered in graphite, daubed with splashes of watercolour. He says, “How about I draw you, and you draw me, and we swap.”

She nods.

 

 

**V**

Silence is like another presence between them. He draws her smiling, but with the thick, dark strokes of his pencil she looks immeasurably sad. His hands aren’t as precise as they used to be, and her face is a mess of corrected lines and shadows that were meant to be details. And she draws him cold, staring somewhere in the distance, holding the crumpled bouquet of flowers.

Sometimes he looks at her and sees the threads of a half-stitched embroidery. The prospect of being something more, of representing something other: it is easy to lose yourself in these woods. Significantly absent, clawing onto the ideas he’d dragged through his life, kicking and screaming. Pointlessness, futility, antagonism. Things that defined him, explained him, obfuscated him. _Mother, mother, you have murdered me!_ And he looks at her, and he watches her, and the pencil snaps under the pressure of his hand, and when he asks for the sharpener he almost calls her Sophia.

She’s not Sophia. Nobody ever is. But she’s Audrey, and that’s good enough.

**Author's Note:**

> idk where all the bloody chamber references came from. i guess it's just subconscious guilt that i'm not revising for my english lit exam.


End file.
